Dalhousie Springs to Coober Pedy - opal capital of the world...

Tuesday finds us on the road at 8:55am. We are already travelling 20km faster than we were last night at 7:30pm and at least in daylight we can see the track. We are not even travelling for 4min and we come across our first bog hole whole Peter and Tim both navigated their way through - the remaining cars took a side track which was safer. Having made our way through quite a wet track we find ourselves waiting for a car that can not get through. This gives us a chance to clean the windows! Peter gets on the radio to check who gets through it all and finally all seven cars are off and running. I think Tim proved his point and we will be the whip in the the convoy to Dalhousie Springs.

The track to Dalhousie Springs in the day time to easy to read and we find the turn off and have 61km to go so at 9:11am you would imagine this to take an hour if we can do 100km/hour on this dirt track. After stopping three times to tell people about the lack of diesel fuel we arrived just after 10:30am.

What a stark difference this environment is at Dehousie Springs. It is a pond that gets heated by the Great Artesian Basin by the 80+ mound springs. The water is filled with minerals and when the water evaporates it leaves a white cover on the dirt. The water is about 34-38° and up to 14m deep with a flow rate of 160L/sec at a hot 43°. I swam beside fairy martins that were flying around me skimming the spring surface and then flying off to the trees. Tim and I also saw a long nosed dragon in the carpark. There are also goby fish in there that nibble your toes. A free natural pedicure, dosen't get better than this!

We decided to relax here for a while and had lunch here too! What a hot day and a hot swim we had - Robyn and Leah have been saying how nice it is first thing in the morning and late at night but we can always come back...infact I love my spa at home so much that I think I can tick this place off the list today.

We are on the road again and are aiming to get to Oodnadatta which is only 177km away. It is an adventure and certainly the roads are challenging and very corregated. We stopped on the way to look at the Delhousie station ruins where a young 15 year old Essington Lewis was sent by his father John Lewis to this location in order "to make a man of him." It was one of the most northern pastoral leases a very remote and isolated place. Interestingly the afgan camel traders left their mark behind too as there are date palms here. They cut many away and only keep the male plants inorder to keep them from breading. Date plams are an introduced species and take up too much water.

By 3:15pm we made it to Oodndatta where we refuelled and waited for the others to turn up. Tim raced Peter at the sandy straight and won, but that won't be general knowledge unless you have read this blog. Peter then took the remaining cars off for a sand dune drive this enabled him not to have to admit that Tim won! (And I thought I was competitive) this is where we had agreed to stop so that we could actually slow the pace down and sit back and set up during daylight having time to put everything up and see exactly what we were doing. But at Oodnadatta everyone knew we only had 195km till Coober Pedy so we were the only ones at 5pm who wanted to camp and this could be dangerous we said our goodbyes to the group. But over the 2 hours of waiting we had a loose sump on Rob's car, Kim had a shock absorber issue (lost nut and bottom shock rubbers and washers). Chris had fuel issues so in the end we drove with the group onwards to the next goal - Coober Pedy. This is actually good as we have Dave's drinks and water, Chris's fuel and Pete, Dave and Peter's jerry cans and even Pete's ladder. And Leah's maps (just remembered this onE as we parts ways sorry Leah and Peter) and will drop them back I promise. Best we come along then! 

We made it to Coober Pedy with the sun setting to our right and the low lying city lights glowing in the horizon. This area is so flat, then you are confronted with mountains of rubble of the mining. We thought we might  have two nights here but we have so much gear on the the ute that parking would be unsafe. And after much tooing and froing it makes sense to get home and start unpacking and cleaning up the ute (and getting washing, ironing, uni, assignments etc) ready for the surburban life we lead. It feels good to know we are homeward bound now and think we will begin the 17hour trip home!

I have leant a lot on this trip, everything has been new - especially the bathroom experience. Now at the end I can unload chairs off the ute, set up the table and help with the tent. This has been challenging physically (I have loads of new muscles), emotionally (learnt a bucket load about each other) and spiritually (been nice to sit and read and reflect on life) especially as we travelled at Easter time. I asked Tim what he has learnt about me on this trip and I evidently ask a lot of questions and complain a lot! I can only improve ready for the next trip, oh I mean character building adventure!